Axiological Representation of the Concept of MOTHER in Modern Russian Linguistic Culture

Throughout the history of mankind, the role of the mother in society has had a special axiological status. The special value of the status of a mother was in the upbringing of the younger generation, the transmission of cultural and spiritual values. At the same time, certain specific features are found in the perception of the image of the mother by one or another people. The purpose of our research is to analyze the features of the concept of MOTHER in Russian linguoculture, which are significant for native speakers of the Russian language of the late XX and early XXI centuries. It was found that for speakers of Russian linguistic culture, a MOTHER is not only a woman with children, but also something close, dear, a source of life, and spiritual value. But if, according to the associative experiment of 1998–1999. at the end of the XX century, the image of the mother existed in the minds of native speakers of the Russian language along with the image of the father (the most frequent reaction), then in 2023–2024. the mother embodies the image of the whole family, since the associate father is a single one. Such a semantic shift is caused, in our opinion, by the following extralinguistic factors: an increase in the number of single-parent families, single mothers. It should also be noted that some of the conceptual features of the concept of MOTHER, reconstructed on the basis of data from explanatory dictionaries of the Russian language, are not updated in the associative fields of the lexeme of the mother verbalizer of the corresponding concept. Signs such as ‘a female in relation to her cubs’, ‘a nun, the wife of a clergyman’, ‘addressing an elderly woman or wife’ are not significant for young speakers of Russian linguistic culture. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.